In Finder on my MacBook, I have put my pictures in several folders that are named with the location where I took the pics. However, when I open up Lightroom 5, the folder names have been replaced with several folders labeled "2016" and subfolders labeled with the dates (e.g. 2016-05-13).

It's different on my iMac. There, the folders have the names of the actual folders (locations, events) and not the dates.

How can I get the Lightroom on my MacBook to show the actual folder names?

Most likely you have imported the photos on your MacBook using the COPY or MOVE option, and so Lightroom has chosen default names of the folders, which are capture date names. You want to choose the ADD option to retain folder names.

If you accidentally used the COPY option, this can be fixed by pointing Lightroom to use the original folders with the original names. To do this, right-click (ctrl-click on Mac) on the date folder name in the Folder Panel on the left, select Update Folder Location, and point Lightroom to the proper folder with the proper name.

As a "thinking-out-of-the-box" alternative (which I actually think is better than the above), assign keywords and other metadata to the photos so you can easily locate the photos, and leave the folder names unchanged.

Thanks, I couldn't figure out how to access the Update Folder command and I realized that I had used Lightroom to import the pics from the camera. Previously, I had imported them using Finder to a named folder.